Salvator Mundi: a painting from Cracow after the lost Early-Netherlandish image. A suggested new dating and possible identification of the donor

Abstract

The image of Christ as Salvator Mundi was painted with tempera on canvas without ground; it comes from the Cracow Cathedral and is currently kept in the Cracow Cathedral Museum. The painting had long been regarded as modern; it was only restoration and research prior the Wawel 1000–2000 exhibition which led to the conclusion that it is a late Gothic work and, at the same time, the only surviving medieval canvas painting from Lesser Poland. The findings of conservation studies were published by Małgorzata Schuster-Gawłowska, and the analysis of style and iconography by Helena Małkiewiczówna, who reported that the painting was probably inspired by the Netherlandish original. It seems that the image of Christ as Salvador Mundi, popular all over late 15th century Europe, in different variants, may originate from non-extant originals from the workshops of Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Weyden – and it is on the basis of the latter one that the Cracow work had probably been painted. So far it has been dated back to around 1480–1490. It seems, however, that such dating is slightly too early. The dating of Christ’s figure and robes as modelled after the older origi-nal does not seem to be reliable (still, it is worth noting that Christ’s facial features are akin to the face of a figure in another Lesser Poland image, i.e. the Annunciationfrom Cięcina from the National Museum in Cracow), whilst stylistic analysis of the figure of the donor suggests early 16th centu-ry. Unidentifiable amongst Cracow clergymen, the founder, a 50 to 60 year old canon of the Jasieńczyk coat of arms, could simply have come from an-other centre – the fact that the picture was painted on canvas suggests, with high probability, that it had been earmarked for transport. Presumably, the donor could be identified as Jakub Karczewski of the Jasieńczyk coat of arms, a Płock canon and, since 1509, a canon custos of Warsaw Chapter, born ca. 1450, who studied in Cracow and who died after 1521. The painting might have been commissioned in Cracow with the aid of Erazm Ciołek, Bishop of Płock, that is before Karczewski left for Warsaw; the year 1509 seems justified anyway by the stylistic analysis of the picture. The wherea-bouts of the work until the second half of the 17th century are unknown; at that point the work was repainted (the coat of arms was corrected) and hung on new hooks – for it is in this context that it was mentioned for the first time in the Cracow Cathedral in the years 1680–1681. Perhaps, in contrary to what was previously assumed, the painting was brought to the Cracow Cathedral for the first time as late as in the second half of the 17th century – it was then that Stanisław Karczewski Jasieńczyk was the warden of the castle, and he could have donated the painting inherited from his ancestors. Baptismal certificates registers of Cracow Cathedral contain records of the baptisms of Stanisław Karczewski’s two sons (in 1660 and 1663) and his sec-ond (?) marriage (in 1670) – it is very likely that the touch-ups to the coat of arms performed at that time could be connected to Karczewski’s donation of the painting to the cathedral.